The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  And that, as usual, was their signal to turn as one and run off at a full gallop as if pursued by generations of moldering Bakers and not to stop running until they were both satisfactorily winded.

  That had been the high point in their last adventure in the graveyard and, in their planning, they had assumed it would be the high point in this one as well, but it turned out not to be so because, thanks to an odd break in the clouds and the sudden appearance of a bold shaft of sunlight, both boys simultaneously spotted a bright glinting among the stones off to their left. Something, they had no idea what, was shining like a huge diamond.

  Without saying a word the two began walking together toward the spot of brilliance. The closer they got to it, the less it became pure radiance and the more it took on solid shape until they saw it was a case of glass mounted on a raised marble casket, and as they came even closer they could make out, through the shining of the glass, a small, standing figure.

  There was a pale marble boy carved full size in the glass case. He had only been eight, you could figure that out by subtracting the dates, and he had been alive a long time ago. His marble clothes were very old-fashioned with many marble buttons on the jacket and knickers, and a fluffy marble bow was tied at his throat.

  The case was sealed with some black substance at the joinings of the glass, but the closure was now far from perfect, the passing of all those years had made the black stuff shrivel, and there were many tiny droplets of water shining on the inside of all its panes.

  The boy’s marble hair was curly, and his carved marble eyes stared out with colorless irises and pupils and gave the odd illusion of seeming to be looking directly at the viewer no matter where he stood.

  Andy and George remained silent for a good, long while, staring at the marble boy, wondering about him and speculating, each one secretly to himself, about his own mortality.

  At length Andy stirred and pointed to the small sarcophagus the statue and its case stood upon. The case, like the statue, was carved from pale, unveined stone, and was waxy smooth.

  “Do you suppose he’s in that thing or buried underground?” Andy asked.

  George stared and pursed his lips in thought.

  “I think he’s in there,” he said at last. “It’s just about the right size, isn’t it?”

  Andy nodded and then he stiffened and pointed.

  “Look at that!” he said.

  There was a crack running wavelike through the lid of the sarcophagus from one side to the other of its middle. It was clearly not only a surface crack. The lid was split.

  “I’ll bet you could open that if you wanted to,” said Andy.

  He crouched down and bent close to the crack in the lid. He reached out his right hand and traced the crack with his forefinger.

  “Hey!” said George. “What’re you doing?”

  Andy looked up at him thoughtfully, then back at the crack, then he placed both hands, timidly at first, palms down on the lower half of the lid.

  “Hey!” said George again.

  “Shut up,” said Andy, softly, and he pressed down on the lid and felt it wobble.

  “It’s loose,” he said, still in the same soft tone.

  “Come on, now, Andy,” said George, “Stop that! You aren’t supposed to do things like that!”

  Andy ignored him, pushing the lid carefully in the direction of the foot of the little marble coffin. The cement which had held the lid in place had crumbled from more than a hundred years of rain and frost and rot and, with a grating sound which sent chills up both their backs, Andy got the lid moving until the crack was a little over two inches wide. Then Andy withdrew his hands and the two boys stared quietly at the opening.

  “I can’t see anything,” George said in a muffled voice. “Can you see anything?”

  Andy bent down until his nose poked just through the crack and squinted.

  “No,” he said.

  He cupped his hands around his eyes to block out sidewise rays of sunlight and continued to peer until George could hardly stand it any more and then he finally spoke.

  “It’s just dark,” he said.

  George could not figure out whether he was relieved or disappointed when his eyes widened in horror as he saw Andy lean back on his knees and begin pulling back the right sleeve of his jacket until he had bared his whole forearm.

  “Oh, no, Andy!” said George.

  “I’m going to do it,” Andy said, and, slowly but steadily, he put his hand through the crack and reached in and down, and further down, and only when his arm was in the little marble casket all the way to the elbow did he stop. He looked up at George with a thoughtful expression.

  “I’m touching something,” he said.

  “Oh, gee!” said George. “Oh, gee, Andy, whyn’t you stop this? Whyn’t you just stop it?”

  “It’s him,” said Andy, and suddenly there were little drops of perspiration all over his forehead. “I’m touching him.”

  He looked up, staring blankly ahead, and began searching with his unseen hand in the darkness of the marble box. He paused, took a deep breath, and made a decisive movement.

  “I’ve got something,” he said, pulling his hand out into the light and staring wide-eyed at something small and green held between his thumb and forefinger.

  George backed up and almost tripped over a gravestone.

  “Put it back!” he cried. “For Pete’s sake, Andy!”

  But Andy stood, still holding his prize. He looked over at George with mixed triumph and confusion.

  “I never thought I could ever do anything like this,” he said, in an exultant whisper. “Jeez, I really didn’t think I could do it!”

  George opened his mouth to speak but stopped with an abrupt, startled jerk of his whole body at a sudden rustling coming, unmistakably, absolutely unmistakably, from the interior of the little marble casket.

  “What’s that?” he hissed.

  Then they both ran, this time really ran, hard as they could, banging their feet onto the graveyard earth. Andy fell once, heavily, with a loud thud, but he scrambled up almost as quickly as a ball bounces.

  Somehow or other, with no idea at all how they did it or any memory whatsoever of doing it, they made their way to the fence and through it, and only when they were clear of the alley and more than half a block up Mercer Avenue to the east did they become aware of what they were doing or where they were. Still moving, they shot quick glances to their rear and began reviewing what had happened.

  First it was only gabble, but then, with a little more distance between them and the graveyard and that small, marble box, they began to make a little sense. Eventually they were only walking very rapidly.

  “Was it him?” George gasped, staring sidewise at his friend. “Was it the marble boy made that noise is there?”

  But they had to walk on another full half block before Andy got his answer ready.

  “Yes,” he said. “’Cause he was rotting. The air got at him and he fell apart.”

  He looked over at George and George looked back at him and they went on a little more in silence.

  “I think he was just kind of caving in,” Andy continued. “It wasn’t that he was really moving.”

  “It wasn’t?” George asked.

  “No.”

  By the time they had reached Maple Street and Main Street they were walking at a reasonable pace. This was the corner where Andy would turn east and George continue on north. George reached out and touched Andy’s arm.

  “Let me see,” he said.

  They both looked around, making sure no one was near, and then Andy opened his hand.

  The green thing rested on Andy’s palm as the two of them studied it in awe. It was a tiny, withered business, like a broken off stick.

  “What’s that?” George asked, pointing at a sort of curved flake growing out of one end of the thing.

  “I don’t know,” said Andy, frowning and squinting his eyes. “I can’t figure it out.”

>   “Oh,” said George in a hushed voice, after a pause, “I think I know what it is.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t you see?” asked George, reaching out to touch the edge of the flake, but then shying away from it. “It’s his fingernail!”

  “Wow!” said Andy, his eyes shining brighter and brighter. “Wow!”

  That evening, at dinner, Andy’s parents asked him a few carefully casual questions as it was obvious that something more or less serious was preoccupying their child, but when all they learned was that he had been nowhere in particular where nothing much had happened, they gave up on it, as they usually did, on the theory that whatever it was would eventually come out if it was really important enough to have to come out.

  After dinner Andy unconvincingly pretended to do his home-work, then he bid his mother and father good night a good full half hour before the usual time, and quietly made his way to his room.

  In bed, with his pajamas on, after listening carefully to make sure no one was in the hall outside, he leaned over and carefully slid the drawer of his bedside table open, noticing for the first time in his life that it moved with a slightly sinister shusshing noise.

  He licked his lips, for they had become suddenly very dry, and bent to look inside the drawer, doing it slowly so as not to rush the moment. It was still there, just where he had placed it, in the exact center of the bottom of the drawer. The two top joints of the left index finger of the marble boy. He knew exactly which finger it was because he had felt the rest of the marble boy’s dry, tiny hand in the darkness in that casket when he had pulled the finger loose.

  Andy stared at it with a kind of solemn joy and shook his head in wonder. He had never had such a thing. He had never heard of any other kid having had such a thing.

  Wait until Chris Tyler had a look at it! Or Johnny Marsh! Or, yes, Elton Weaver! Andy could hardly wait to see the sick, envious expression on Elton Weaver’s usually smug face when he got a look at it!

  He smiled at the finger affectionately, then gently closed the drawer, shush, then turned off the lamp and settled into his bed with a sigh of deep contentment. He pulled the covers up until they were just under his chin and, with a clear, shining vision of Elton Weaver’s tortured face floating before him, he drifted contentedly off to sleep.

  When he awoke, some hours later, he had no idea why. He stirred, blinked, and then looked up with a growing sense of wrongness to observe that the bedroom door was open. He could see the pale paint of its outer surface gleaming faintly in the dim light coming from the bathroom down the hall.

  He sat up, puzzled. He was sure that the door had been closed. He knew that it had been closed. He had been particularly careful that evening about closing it because of the finger. Had his father or mother peeked in and then gone off and left the door open by mistake? It didn’t seem like them.

  But then he realized that something was happening to the door even as he looked at it. It was changing shape, growing narrower. He couldn’t understand how that could possibly be happening until he realized, with a sharp, hurtful pang in his chest, that he was watching the door being slowly and deliberately closed.

  He had just cowered back to the headboard in a kind of half sitting position when he heard the faint, crisp click of the latch announce that the door’s shutting was complete. He peered into the gloom at the foot of his bed but he could see nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  He swallowed and opened his mouth in order to speak, but found he couldn’t. He swallowed again and this time managed to whisper: “Who’s there?”

  Had he heard a noise? Had there been a brittle grating? An odd, grotesquely unsuccessful effort to reply from somewhere in the darkness over there?

  He tried again: “Who’s there?”

  This time he knew he’d heard a noise, a different sort of noise than the last one, but definitely a noise. What had it been? A sort of dry rustle, that was it. There’d been a faint sort of rustle at the foot of his bed in the darkness over there. He pulled more of himself nearer to the headboard until he was crouching against it as far away as possible from the bed’s foot. He gathered the sheets and blankets, bunching them in front of him like a soft, cloth wall. He strained his eyes, peering into the darkness as hard as he could.

  Was there something there in the dark? It almost seemed so. It almost seemed he could barely make out a small something only barely higher than the top of the bed. Something moving.

  Andy squeezed his knees against his chest and lifted the edge of the sheets and blankets so that only his eyes looked over the top edge. He was sure, now, absolutely certain that he was seeing something in the dark, even though he could only make it out as a faint silhouette.

  It was working its way along the side of the bed. Very slowly. Very, very carefully. Awkwardly. Now Andy was able to see just a little something of the shape of the silhouette. It was round at the top.

  Then he realized that he was breathing so hard that it was impossible to listen to anything else, particularly to the sort of soft sounds he’d heard before when he’d seen the bedroom door close, so he held his breath completely and, sure enough! he could hear the rustling which he’d heard before. And it was much closer.

  Andy let himself breathe again because he realized he didn’t want to hear the rustling after all, because he’d heard it before, and not just tonight but earlier that day! He’d told himself and George a lie about the rustling, saying it was probably only the falling in of old bones and rotting fabric, but he’d known better. He’d known it hadn’t been any such thing at all. He’d known, deep down inside of him, standing by the cracked casket back there in the graveyard, that he and George were listening to the stirrings of the marble boy!

  There was something else in the bedroom which he remembered from the graveyard: the sour, bitter smell which had oozed out of the casket when he’d opened up its lid, only this time it came from next to his bedside table where the silhouette now stood.

  But, being this close to Andy, it was no longer just a silhouette. There was a lace collar, the sunken shoulders of the jacket were moldering velvet, and the brass buttons had all turned to lumps of verdigris. There was quite a bit of straight blond hair left on the skull and though someone had long ago carefully parted it in the middle, it stood up at all sorts of horrible angles. He could make out nothing of its face.

  “Your finger’s in the drawer!” Andy whispered with a great effort and hardly any breath at all to do it with. “I’m sorry I took it! Honest I am!”

  It wavered and half turned to the bedside table. It even reached out to it, and a black little spider of a hand hooked its fingers over the knob, but then it slowly rotated its head on its thin little log of a neck until it was staring directly at Andy and he could just make out the stirring of leathery wrinklings deep inside its sockets. It made a small forward lurch and reached out spastically toward the bed with both of its shriveled, stumpy arms. A great gust of foul air puffed out from it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Andy in a voice so weak and faint he could barely hear himself. “I’m sorry!”

  It clutched the blanket and pulled itself up onto the bed and as it dragged its stiff little body over the covers, closer and closer to Andy, he could see its rigid smile widen terribly.

  He opened his mouth to plead again and had just discovered that he lacked the breath to even whimper when it suddenly grabbed both his wrists with an unyielding, merciless grip and bent its round, sour head over his left hand and bit the edges of its sharp little teeth deeper and deeper into the skin of Andy’s forefinger.

  It wasn’t going to settle for what was in the drawer.

  HARLAN ELLISON

  Mefisto in Onyx

  WHAT CAN ANYONE say about Harlan Ellison that has not already been said? The Washington Post called him “one of the great living American short story writers,” and the Los Angeles Times said, “It’s long past time for Harlan Ellison to be awarded the title: 20th century Lewis Carroll.”

>   In a career spanning nearly forty years, he has won more awards than any other fantasist for the sixty-plus books he has written and edited, the more than 1700 stories, essays, articles and newspaper columns, two dozen teleplays and a dozen motion pictures he has created.

  The author is currently working as the Conceptual Consultant for the television series Babylon 5, and his most recent books include Dreams With Sharp Teeth and Mind Fields, the latter with Polish artist Jacek Yerka. His 1992 novelette, “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” was selected from among more than 6,000 short stories published in America for inclusion in the 1993 edition of The Best American Short Stories, and he was awarded the Life Achievement Award at the 1993 World Fantasy Convention.

  The powerful novella which follows (which the author refers to as a “toad-strangler”) is one of Ellison’s longest pieces of fiction for some years. The version which appears here was originally published as a handsome hardcover by Mark V. Ziesing Books, and the story has been optioned for filming by MGM.

  ONCE. I only went to bed with her once. Friends for eleven years – before and since – but it was just one of those things, just one of those crazy flings: the two of us alone on a New Year’s Eve, watching rented Marx Brothers videos so we wouldn’t have to go out with a bunch of idiots and make noise and pretend we were having a good time when all we’d be doing was getting drunk, whooping like morons, vomiting on slow-moving strangers, and spending more money than we had to waste. And we drank a little too much cheap champagne; and we fell off the sofa laughing at Harpo a few times too many; and we wound up on the floor at the same time; and next thing we knew we had our faces plastered together, and my hand up her skirt, and her hand down in my pants . . .

  But it was just the once, fer chrissakes! Talk about imposing on a cheap sexual liaison! She knew I went mixing in other peoples’ minds only when I absolutely had no other way to make a buck. Or I forgot myself and did it in a moment of human weakness.

  It was always foul.

  Slip into the thoughts of the best person who ever lived, even Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, just to pick an absolutely terrific person you’d think had a mind so clean you could eat off it (to paraphrase my mother), and when you come out – take my word for it – you’d want to take a long, intense shower in Lysol.